Scaling Your Startup 10x From $20M to $200M with Sapphire, Lightspeed, TripActions, and 6Sense

Hey everyone, it's so great to be here. First of all, huge thank you to Jason M. Lemkin and the entire SaaStr crew for bringing us all together in person. This is really wonderful. I'm Kathy Gao, a partner at Sapphire Ventures. We are a venture capital firm. We love B2B SaaS. And we invest in companies at the Series A all the way to pre-IPO. We're here today to talk about a really exciting and interesting topic, which is how to scale your startup from $20 million of ARR to $100 million. I think this will be helpful to our panelists. So show of hands really quickly. How many people in the audience are founders? Raise your hand, please. Wow. Okay. We have a good number. Awesome. And how many people in the audience are focused on go-to-market sales marketing? Oh, wow. Okay. Keep your hands up if you're sales. I see you guys. Okay. And then marketing. Kind of an even split, which is cool. Well, I'm joined today by an amazing panel. We have two very, very seasoned operators who've done this before and are thrilled to share their wisdom with you, as well as my co-moderator, growth investor, partner at Lightspeed. And I think we've been friends for 10 years or something like that. Anoushka. But maybe I'll have my panelists all introduce themselves, tell them a little bit, tell you guys a little bit about their companies. And just for fun, tell us when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Carlos, I'll start with you.

Okay. Thank you. And by the way, by seasoned, I think you meant old. Thank you very much. So I'm CRO at a company called TripActions, and we are modernizing corporate travel and expense management and doing well. I'm happy to talk more about it if it's relevant. And previously, I was CRO of MongoDB, through the journey that sort of coincides with the topic today. Grew up in Miami and have lived in Europe and New York and San Francisco. And what did I want to be when I grew up? Well, at different stages, different things, but I convinced my parents to buy me a horse at one time, and I was really into that. And so I thought I was going to be a cowboy. And as an adult, I learned how much money cowboys make. And here I am.

Hi, everyone. I am Latany Konant, Chief Market Officer at Sixth Sense. And Sixth Sense, we are the leading account engagement platform. And what that means is we actually power B2B revenue teams. We provide insights into something that we call the dark funnel. This is all the people that are in market for what you do, but you have no idea. So we uncover that dark funnel so that you know who's in market for what you do. And then we help your sales and marketing teams go and proactively engage with the accounts most likely to buy. So that's a little bit about us. I wanted to be a heart surgeon and I got to college and I had to take chemistry, duh. And I am a huge klutz. And I was a disaster in chemistry lab. I had the highest bill of broken beakers and Petri dishes. And after that, I decided maybe I should major in accounting and be a CPA. So that's what I did for a little bit.

Hi, everyone. Pleasure to be here today with all of you. I'm a partner at Lightspeed Ventures on our enterprise side. We've been lucky to work with a number of incredible companies, including Carta, Rubrik, Nutanix, and TripActions. So it's a pleasure to have Carlos with me today. I've been in enterprise investing for over 4 years now, and what I wanted to be when I grew up was a veterinarian, which is, you know, bears absolutely no resemblance to my day to day, which seems to be a common theme among this panel.

Awesome. So we wanted to really cover two major topics in today's discussion. One is all about go-to-market execution, right? This is a big topic that is very important no matter what stage a company you're really in. And then the second is all about talent and culture. How do you think about that as you're scaling companies, um, to adapt and expand to your growing enterprise. So I'll start first and then hand it over to Anoushka to talk about talent and culture. But for go-to-market playbook, you know, for this stage, 20 to 100, it can be pretty tricky because certain strategies that may have worked before in the past might now need changes or major adjustments. I know all of you guys are here very curious to hear what Carlos and Latane have seen at their respective companies. So let me jump in and maybe I'll start with Latane first. Take us back to 2018 when you started at Sixth Sense and then fast forward to now. What were some of the biggest changes that you had to adapt to as CMO?

Yeah, it's so funny. In preparing for this panel, I called our CFO and I went into the Wayback Machine and I was like, okay, what— when exactly were we? And then I'm like, what was I doing and what was I struggling with to kind of recreate history. And I would say, you know, sub-$20 million, I call beast mode. Everybody does everything. And you're looking for Swiss Army knives. And it's a little bit like swarm ball, right? You guys seen kids play soccer? Everybody's running at the ball. Everyone's trying to get something done. But you may or may not be really making plays. When you get to 20, you need to start really building a team with dedicated specialists. And so that was kind of a big aha, and I think that's important to think about, is you don't want to be playing peewee soccer, and you don't want every day to be an act of heroics long-term. But when I went back in the Wayback Machine, there are sort of 3, I think, big things that collectively Mark, who's our head of sales, and I, did right. Maybe we lucked into it. I don't know. The first thing that we did is we really, really defined what I call is our revenue operating model. And we hired rev ops. We didn't hire marketing ops. We didn't hire sales ops. Because one of the most embarrassing moments of my career is me standing up with my revenue model that marketing ops put together and my head of sales standing up with his and they weren't exactly the same. That doesn't work. So we hired RevOps and we created this revenue operating model. It works backward into pipeline quotas. So I have pipeline quotas. How much needs to get created every week, every month, every quarter across the business? We track our, our sales velocity formula, which is win rates, ASPs, and cycle times. Critical, critical. And we look at net retention. And we are always finding the red and working together across those key metrics by go-to-market segment. And we have a steward of that with one team that owns that for all of us. So that was a huge, huge, I think, thing that we did right. The second thing is we— We built an outbound motion that really, really works. And I think when you get to a certain point, you need to be out capturing demand very, very efficiently and effectively. And it's very easy to dump a lot of money into a non-efficient outbound motion. And the reason I say this is one of the things that I did is I was a BDR for a day. If I go back into the way— Wayback Machine, we had a lot of BDRs working really hard. Really inconsistent results. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? We're hiring these great people. We got a career path. They're going to be the future of our sales team. What is going on? Well, they waste a colossal amount of time is the reality. And that's on us as leaders. And so really setting your BDRs to be laser-focused on behavioral-based signal, the ideal customer profile, and having a lot of rigor and process around that. And then, you know, the kicker is making sure that they can graduate into being AEs. So that has made us really, really successful, is just investing in that function and doing it right. And then the third thing is we never thought small. No matter how big you are, if you're $20 million, think you're 100 million. If you're 100 million, act and think like you're 300 million. Never ever think small. And so we did a lot of things that most people would think were audacious and bold and wild, but we did them to really break out of the noise. And so it's better to do a few things that seem a little bit crazy that are really, really bold than do a bunch of play-it-safe things. And I think we did those 3 things right.

Thank you. By the way, RevOps, I feel like it's a new kind of category. Back when I was working at Gusto in 2015, we didn't have RevOps. And now I, you know, was at SaaStr yesterday. So many CEOs I spoke with, they said, oh, RevOps is one of our buyer personas. So it does seem like a big shift. Carlos, what about you? I mean, you were at MongoDB during a very critical time and now you're at the helm leading go-to-market at TripActions. Any insights you can share on how those organizations changed as they scaled?

Sure.

I think getting to 20 or to 10 and then to 20 is hard for a whole bunch of reasons. That have a lot to do with being in the right market and having the right product and having the right demo and the right use case and, and all of that. And I have strong opinions on PLG, which maybe we'll talk about later. But getting from 20 to 100, you don't get there with— you don't get there with a great product alone or a sexy demo or the ability to go do some big deals. You need a machine and you need repeatability. And that is based on having a strong foundation. And from a sales perspective, I think that foundation has sort of 3 pillars. The first is recruiting. You've got to have crystal clarity on what's the profile of the AE that's going to be successful here. How do we identify that profile? What do they look like on LinkedIn before we waste time, you know, assessing them? Then how do we quickly assess them? And lastly, how do we, how do we keep the great talent that we have? I think I missed attract. So identify, attract, assess, and retain are the sort of the subdisciplines under recruiting. And you've got to really get that right and invest in it as a thing. That needs to be a core competency. The second is development, and by that I mean skill development. So the enablement has to be kick-ass. You don't disrupt a market by hiring the people from the legacy vendors and hoping they'll figure it out. You need fresh thinking. And so really what that means is you hire sales athletes, exceptional sales talent that probably doesn't know anything about your market. So at MongoDB, The sales team, Oracle people did really poorly for the most part. We hired salespeople.

Hopefully no one is from Oracle here. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. It's just the truth. And at TripActions, Concur people and Amex people do poorly. So you disrupt the market by bringing in really strong sales talent, sales athletes, and then just giving them amazing training. And that's, you know, the corporate enablement, sales enablement, product enablement, but then, you know, strong coaching and just really being thoughtful about that learning journey from I'm aggressive and I'm talented in sales, but I don't know anything about databases or travel and expense management. So that's sort of the second pillar. You got to get that right. And then the third pillar is execution, which is sort of a catch-all for everything else. It's the least important of the— it's important, but it's the least important of the three. Because if you have amazing talent and kick-ass training, you could kind of like get out of their way and they'll probably do well. It's even better if you have like a strong framework for execution. And I'd say the sub-disciplines in the execution pillar are going to be pipeline generation. And Latane talked about the outbound motion. I think she was referring to BDRs. I'm a proponent, a strong proponent of having AEs also responsible for outbound pipeline generation. If it's interesting, I can talk later about why. The second is champion building. So within sales, there has to be a real methodology around how we identify a potential champion, how we discover their pain, how we turn them, develop them into a real champion, test them, use them, etc. And then the third one is qualification, so that the sales team has a methodology that enables them to identify the opportunities that are worth pursuing. And if so, what are the issues that are worth solving? But importantly, identify the opportunities that are not worth pursuing so that they don't squander their time. So you don't get from 20 to 100, in my opinion, or in my experience, without having some maturity around those three pillars. The people, the development, and the execution.

Makes a lot of sense. And I want to pull on a thread that Carlos brought up, which is PLG, right? That seems to be the acronym du jour. I think there was a panel on Monday about PLG, and I've heard multiple people talk about PLG in their panels over the past couple of days. Maybe I'll start with Carlos. Share with our group what your take is on all this hoopla around these three letters today, and if there's any PLG elements that are— that currently exist at TRIPActions.

So I'll get to the second part in a second, but I was thinking about this. I knew this would come up given this audience and this event.

Well, given the prep call.

And the prep call, and I've heard that there's been several sessions on PLG and David Sachs, who I think highly of, presented yesterday. So I know PLG is a thing. I was thinking about it, and I think I'm speaking now to the founders. If your investors and your mentors are telling you, go do PLG, go be PLG, I feel like that's right, but not particularly useful. It's like telling your kids, go be great at school. Well, yeah, of course I'm gonna do better in life if I'm great at school, but Maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe I'm dyslexic. Maybe I don't go to a good school. And even if I do get straight A's, that doesn't ensure that I'm going to be— there's so much more to it. So PLG, you know, having a product that has this crazy hook that goes viral, this like amazing demo that makes people want to buy, it's amazing. If you have it, enjoy it. MongoDB had it. You know, you could download this database, the community, the free version. And the first 30 minutes were incredible. And then our salespeople ran around and found those people and monetized it. And so that was great. And at TripActions, it's great. You know, people who have used Concur or Agenzia or something else and they see TripActions, they're like, holy shit, it looks like Instagram, but it does all this, you know, it handles all this complexity that I need to handle to get from point A to point B. Or they see our expense tool and they're like, wait a minute, I don't have to. Keep a, you know, a box full of receipts. I don't have to do ever expense reports. So it is great to have the hook, but you don't get from 20 to 100 on PLG because, you know, to get from 20 to 100, you're probably doing bigger deals and you're doing bigger deals at bigger companies. And so PLG makes for a great meeting. And, you know, I think in 100, if you're selling to a 100-person company, especially a tech company, where they're really smart and they connect the dots quickly, sure, a great demo, a great use case will do it. If you're trying to scale, you're gonna be selling to companies where there are lots of people involved in the decision. Some of the people involved in the decision will never even see the product. And so you need to have a sales team that can discover pain and build real value and can do top-down in conjunction with bottom-up. And so that's what we did at MongoDB, and that was critical to, to going, you know, from 20 to 100 and then 200. And same at TripActions. It's been the, it's been the key to going upmarket. We've quadrupled the number of Fortune 500 customers we have during COVID And that just doesn't happen. It happens bottom-up, but over 20 years, and your investors aren't that patient. Jill.

I was chuckling a little bit because as a VC, I'm sure Anoushka can understand too, we're definitely guilty of saying, try PLG, like the magic bullet to help grow fast.

Get good grades. Get a 4.0. Be smart.

Fair enough. Latane, any thoughts on that?

So I obsess over experience. I think that's a huge part of being a CMO and a go-to-market leader. And it's not just the product experience, it's everything experience, right? How a salesperson shows up to a meeting, how someone interacts on your website. And to me, bringing forward a product experience is a really smart thing to do. Like if you've got a cool— but it's not to me— and that's a good demand signal. I think that there's like this purist notion of PLG that I guess maybe I reject the purist, that it's you put your product out there, everyone, you know, they upsell themselves. You don't even have sales reps. If you can do it, God bless. I just, I haven't seen that play out in my real life and my adult life. But I love the notion of bringing a product experience forward. I'm part of a CMO community, and one of the most brilliant CMOs is someone named Kevin Marasco. And he brought it home to me. He calls it a snack. And I'm like, that's brilliant. Everyone loves snacks. And it doesn't have to be a free trial. I think the other thing is everyone's like, it has to be a free trial. It has to be a free trial. It can just be a product snack. Because your buying team is very diverse, and there's going to be people on your buying team that want to get in and see the snack and test that it works. But you're right, the executive on your buying team is never going to snack out. They're just not. They might have a drink. I don't know. But so I feel like that's a very realistic way to approach it. And we've seen that work tremendously by bringing aspects of our product forward. And then the other thing that I think is really important about adopting PLG in your demand motion is before we would, as marketers, put out content, and that was a hook, right? People would sign up for our content or exchange their email for content. That just doesn't work anymore. No one is filling out your forms for your content. And so you have to have something richer and more interesting to engage folks. And I think having some sort of, you know, experience or calculator or something more meaty is a really important part of a go-to-market, modern go-to-market motion today.

And the last topic I want to cover on go-to-market execution, I think, will be kind of a fun one because we have half sales folks in the audience and half marketers in the audience. You know, Latany representing the marketers and Carlos representing the sales. Oftentimes there's some friction, some conflict between marketing and sales, especially as companies scale. So talk to us a little bit about what potential frictions you've seen in your career, either Carlos or Latane.

Well, I, I'm cheating a little bit because I'm a recovering software salesperson who's now in marketing. But I think there's two— I'm going to approach this from two angles. I think marketers need to understand that the only asset that Carlos and his team have is their time. And they have to choose every single second of every single day wisely. Not just if they want to make their number, if they want to have a job. And so I think about marketing-led sales, meaning how do I put, how do I think about my sales team as the most precious, the most expensive channel? Just like I wouldn't go and send champagne to everybody who came to my website, why would I expect Carlos to follow up and call everyone who came to my website if that's not a good demand signal. There are other ways to follow up. So my job is to separate the most winnable demand signals, the most winnable, and, and obsess over that sales velocity model so that I can put Carlos and his team in a position to win. And I think that if more marketing folks thought that way, it would help ease a lot of the friction and a lot of the passing bullshit MQLs to sales. So that's that side of it. The other side of it though, and my, I guess, ask of someone like Carlos is when you create your plan, the worst thing that you can do to me is go off, you do your quota builds with finance, you come up with some territories, and you do not involve me. And then I am stuck trying to feed all of these AEs that there's no market-led lens on how these territories were created. How were these accounts selected? Why are we going after this? Is this an ideal customer profile? You know, and I think that— and so the more I think sales and marketing can work together to triangulate on a plan that isn't just quota builds, isn't just, well, you did this last year, times it by XYZ. It's really market-driven. Where are we going in the market? How many accounts look like that? How many are winnable? The better shape we are all in at the end of the day. So that's my ask of CROs.

Great. I think there's, as you were talking about it, I think there's maybe a meta point, which is high-functioning exec teams are highly empathetic of each other and more so than they are of their own group. Meaning as CRO, if I'm part of a high-functioning team, I have a stronger relationship with the CFO and the head of product and the head of marketing than I do with my team. And I understand their challenges. And if you have that, I've been in organizations where sales and marketing couldn't stand each other. And I've had the good fortune for two companies in a row now, I've worked with Megan Eisenberg, who's a fabulous CMO at both MongoDB and now at TripActions. And we're completely aligned. She doesn't care really whether in a given month we hit are meeting conversion metrics or not. She cares, did we make the number? And so we are completely aligned to what the company cares about versus what each team cares about. And I think that's really the core of when there's tension. Marketing is looking for a metric and sales is externalizing the responsibility for pipeline. And so I mentioned earlier, AEs doing outbound pipeline generation themselves at TripActions and at MongoDB. Tuesdays are special, PG Tuesdays. So there's this entire cadence where AEs select focus accounts on Thursdays. They do prep over the weekend. They present their prep on Mondays. Tuesdays are sacred, no meetings. It's all outbound prep. And we do PG wrap-ups on Fridays. When you have AEs feeling that it's their responsibility to generate pipeline, now, number 1, there's more pipeline. That's great. But number 2, whatever pipeline they get from their SDRs or inbound from marketing is a gift from the heavens. And they treat it with the respect that it merits versus, uh, that lead's not good enough. They get like, you know, Morris the cat, get all finicky. So. I think that's what I think.

One of— I worked for a CEO at Appirio, Chris Barbin, and we were having some dysfunctions across the team. And it was funny. He sat us all down. I'll never forget this. And he said, this is your first team. End of story. Like, this is your first team. And you're not the marketing team. You're not the head of the marketing team. Like, you're not the head of the product team and you're not the head of the finance team. You guys are all first team. And to me, that, I don't know, I'll never forget it. And it's created a real aha and a shift in mindset that I love what you were saying. I think you have to think about your executive peers as your first team.

So we talked a lot about go-to-market execution, which is no doubt a super core component of scaling your business. But just as important, maybe even more important, is the talent, the talent around your organization. So let me pass it over to Anoushka to ask some questions on talent and culture.

You know, maybe just to kick it off, Carlos and Latane, you've been part of organizations that have not just scaled, but scaled incredibly quickly. How have you guys thought about maintaining culture during this period of rapid growth? Maybe Latane kicking it off with you.

So I learned, I learned a lot about building great culture at Appirio because it was a professional services firm. Our people were our product. End of story. And so I think having that mentality, even though you're a product company, because people make products. And so one of the things that I have embraced is something that I call the fun factor. So I think work should be fun. I don't think it should be a grind. I think that if you believe in what you're doing and you think it's cool and you're working with cool people and you're changing the world, that's fun. And it's not about foosball or snacks. Even except product snacks because I talked about those and they're cool. And so I ask people, what is your fun factor? And now we do a poll. Every all-hands meeting, we do a Pulse poll of the team. Out of the last 10 working days, how many days were fun? And our goal as a company is that 8 out of 10 working days are fun. You're inspired, you like who you're working with. And we say, if you're not, like, let's talk about it. And if you can't talk to your manager, call me. And, and that's what we've, we've striven for. And that's really worked well for us to embrace the mentality of it's okay, you should be enjoying this. And if you're not, let's talk about it.

I like that. We can call it Net Fun Score. NFS. Yeah.

Carlos would love your thoughts.

So I think on the topic of talent and culture. I'll maybe talk about those separately. But with talent, I think it is, as I mentioned before, really important to crystallize who do we want. And that changes, obviously, per role. But as you're scaling a sales organization, the things that I've thought about and have found to be you know, super impactful is, let's just talk about the quota-carrying sales rep, sort of the core unit of production in the sales organization. We have intangibles and we have tangibles. And so the intangibles are intelligence. They've got to be smart enough to connect the dots, put the value prop in front of the customer, do discovery, etc. They've got to have drive or grit, which is really a combination of They want to win really badly, and importantly, they're willing to persevere through the obstacles to get there. So the combination is what I call direct coachability. They're not set in their ways, but they're not so coachable that the customer is going to push them around. So coachability is like there's an ideal range. And then values. They're honest. We can trust them. We can, we can feel confident that they're representing the company appropriately. So those are the intangibles we want. As much of those as possible, especially drive. Drive's the one that's most linearly correlated with results. Intelligence is more of a threshold value. If they're smart enough, they're smart enough. And sure, more is better, but really it's drive that, that scales. And then in terms of the intangibles, it's pipeline gen— as I mentioned, it's pipeline generation, champion building, and qualification. And so If you get your profile right and you know what companies are likely to have that profile and you sort of go after people that have that profile, then what you end up building is a team with high talent density. And then so that's, so that's one element. I don't think you can have a great culture if you don't have highly talented people and talent defined the way, the way that makes sense for the role. And then in terms of culture, I think, you know, one of the things that I have found to be super impactful is having lots of two-way or peer-to-peer communication. So it's been really hard during COVID with everyone over Zoom, but having quarterly business reviews, QBRs, is critical. Every, you know, every level in the organization has a QBR where they come in and they say, hey, this— we're going to do some training. The leader is going to identify here's some things we need to get better at and we'll spend some time on it. But then every single person gets up and presents. This is what I accomplished in the last 90 days. This is what you can expect from me in the next 90 days. This is what I need from the organization. These are my challenges. These are my— these are my tailwinds. And having that sort of moment in time where we get everything on the table. If you have a talented team with open communication, that can be a really important event to promote culture.

So just, just to pile on to that moment in time, because many of you, I would assume, are preparing for next year and maybe even have started planning your sales or field kickoff. And one of The biggest mistakes that I see is like people don't take it seriously. And to me, field kickoff and invite your entire go-to-market team, not just sales, entire go-to-market team, is one of the most important weeks of the year. And you should do a mid-year. And it should be amazing. As good as a customer-focused event. The content should be reviewed. You should have stingers. It should be high energy. That meeting sets the tone for the entire year. And I say never waste a deadline. So if you need to get your strategy done, get it done. If you need a new pitch done, if you need a new cert done, you need the website updated, like that is showtime and such a critical event. It's not just a meeting in a bad Hilton ballroom. Like, make it really impactful for people. So, somewhat tactical, but I found to be tremendously important.

I agree completely. And just one thing I'll add to that, one thing I've seen work well, you can only do it up to a certain size, is actually have the entire company at day one. You know, day one is typically all about inspiring, and that benefits the entire company. Typically days 2 and 3 are more about education. But that day 1, if you can get the whole company there, do it right, and then get the whole company there, pays dividends.

Yeah.

One question, you know, we've been having a lot of discussions with CEOs on and, you know, some of you might be experiencing on your teams is this feeling of burnout and there being kind of a great resignation where a lot of people are, you know, opting to leave. Companies. How have you guys combated burnout and maintained morale on your teams?

I think if Carlos and I had the answer to that, we would be like doing a TED Talk right now. Because there's no answer. I mean, I think every single one of us are dealing with this. We talk about it every week in our executive team meeting. It's very real. And I think for some of us Gen Xers, like, it's a head-scratcher because we're just used to grinding, right? But, and so the way that we've approached it and the way that I have approached it with my team is my father-in-law has a saying that everyone's going through something all the time. And this is challenging for us because we want rules. We want to say, well, if, you know what, people are just working too hard and if we just give everyone Friday off, this will go away and we won't have to deal with it. Right, well, maybe that makes it more stressful, 'cause they don't wanna be at home, 'cause there's some situation going on there. And so, that's the challenging nature of it, is you really have to look at what is going on with that person, and try to make accommodations at the individual level, which I think as organizations, especially scaling organization, that want rules and want categories, this is not fitting into that. And so we just have to maintain flexibility. And I think we talk about it every week and it just has to be a topic and a number one priority.

Yeah, I'll piggyback on— I'll second the thought that I— the notion that I don't know the answer, but I've definitely made some mistakes during COVID At the beginning of COVID You know, we were only— it's only going to be 2 weeks. So how do we maintain productivity during these 2 weeks of working at home? Well, I know we're going to have 2 stand-ups a day, 7:45 to 8:30, and another one at the end of the day. Keep everyone— about 6 days into it, people are like, we have nothing to talk about, and we're meeting twice a day. This is— and so I discovered Zoom fatigue before it was a term. But so I did that. So don't do that. And hopefully no one is. But, you know, I think people are most engaged when they're growing and learning and winning, feel like they're winning. And so one of the things that we had to do at TripActions is adjust what is the definition of success in this environment. And we introduced new metrics into the sales team. That were real, but that were also achievable in this environment. And so if people feel like they're winning, that's a lot. And, and really getting more creative around how to deliver that enablement so that they feel when they put their head on the pillow, I'm better today than I was yesterday or a week ago. If people feel like they're winning and they feel like they're growing, that goes a long way. I will also say that COVID has had has provoked existential crises for a lot of us, and many people have decided, "Hey, this is not for me," whether they were a server in Manhattan or an SDR in Palo Alto, and I think that's okay. And some people have decided to go change careers, and what that means is that there's pressure on the leadership to really always be recruiting that the right, the right caliber. So I don't believe in like coercing people to stay. It has caused people to reexamine their careers and their lives, and that's okay.

So one of the things that I— we talk about weekly at the executive team level, but also on every single team is recruiting. Everybody recruits. And when you're trying to double every single year, The only thing standing in your way is hiring great people. Like, that's it. And what I think a lot of functions outside of sales don't understand is that if you don't hire to plan, like, that's a fireable offense. Like, when you're a sales leader, if you don't hire to plan, you can get fired for that. But when you go outside of sales, they're like, oh, well, oh yeah, that interview. And so injecting a mindset of no, no, hiring is your number one priority. And so on my team meetings now, the first thing we talk about is who's your open hiring pipeline? Why are you getting behind on your hires? And it's— people are like drowning and they don't understand. I'm like, I'm giving you budget. Here's a lifeboat. You got one stroke to get in. And so I think that's a really important thing to think about. Outside of just sales, because it's more commonly accepted in sales, but looking across all your teams.

Let me piggyback on that. I think there's a dangerous dynamic that exists sometimes, which is recruiting is the recruiting team's problem. It's my job to like interview and qualify, but it's their job to find talent.

Yeah, I don't have any candidates. Well, have you gone on LinkedIn?

Yeah, that's right.

Have you asked your network? This is your problem, not theirs.

The analog, it's leader recruiting is the analog to AEPG. It's their responsibility and anything the talent team does is gravy on top. And so I think that's a really healthy sort of way to operate.

On the topic of recruiting, I know one thing, you know, many individuals on various teams struggle with, founders struggle with, is how do you think about the decision to externally hire versus to promote from intern. And, you know, would be curious for both of you how you've thought about that decision on your teams. Carlos?

Yeah, sure. I think it's just a mathematical equation. So first principle is promote if possible. It's healthy for the organization. They already— we know who they are. And so if And so really the only reason not to promote from within is if we look at the individual and we say, okay, for the new job that they would be in, the skill gap between what they have today and what they need to be high functioning in that new role is greater than what they can fill in the time that we can wait. So in a high growth company, it will happen that there are amazing people whose career is doing this. But the company's doing this. And so they do need to get layered and you need to bring leaders from the outside. But it's only if there aren't people inside that we believe can, can close the skill gap in a, in a reasonable period of time.

I think also thinking of lateral moves like, like sometimes you have someone who isn't ready now or you don't have a role, but gosh, if they got experience as a customer success leader, when they came back, how much like richer and more educated and more experience would they have? So I think about it more as— and again, back to my father-in-law— everyone's going through something all the time. So looking at the individual and saying, where do you want to be? Where can you be? And how do we get you the most rich experience here to get you where you want to be? And always ask people where they want to be 2 or 3 jobs from now. 'Cause a lot of times they only see one move, and we need to be helping them make that second or third move. And I think that helps, you fill in gaps organizationally, retain people, and then you can, then you see where you don't have chess pieces, and that's when you hire.

And, you know, maybe as we're kind of wrapping up, you know, Latany, Carlos, you've both been been at organizations that have gone from, you know, zero to over 100, which is pretty remarkable. Any summary or final thoughts for the audience, Latane?

Giddy up.

I love it.

Giddy up. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to always be learning and growing and challenging yourself. The second you feel like you know it all, I hate being here actually, 'cause I'm like, I don't know. I'm learning, I'm growing. And so I think the second that you stop doing that as a leadership team is a very, very dangerous place to be. And then the other thing is, $100 million, I'm thinking $300 million, right? So you, again, back to being bigger, thinking bigger, always be thinking much bigger than you are today.

I guess I agree with all that. I think slope matters more than scale. And so when you're hiring thinking, oh, I want to get to $100 million, I need someone who has overseen $100 million. Well, if they oversaw something that went from $80 to $120, they might not be very good at building. And so someone who went from $10 to $40 is likely a lot better than someone that went from $80 to $100. And so it's the slope. Yeah, exactly. So the slope of the curve that they oversaw matters more than the scale of the team that they, that they oversaw.